Anyone want to start a fab with me? We can buy an ASML machine and figure out the rest as we go. Toronto area btw
I hope you have very deep pockets. But I'm cheering you on from the sidelines.
that is an understatement
The RAM shortage comes for us all
41–50 of 416 posts
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#42> Micron's killing the Crucial brand of RAM and storage devices completely, More rot economy. Customers are such a drag. Lets just sell to other companies for billion dollar deals at once. These AI companies have bottomless wallets. No one has thought of this before we will totally get rich.
"I don't want to make a little bit of money every day. I want to make a fuck ton of money all at once."
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#43My understanding is that this is primarily hitting DDR5 RAM (or better). With prices so inflated, is there an argument to revert and downgrade systems to DDR4 RAM technology in many use cases (which is not so inflated)?
It will be hit just as hard, they have stopped new DDR4 production to focus on DDR5 and HBM.
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#44If the OpenAI Hodling Company buys and warehouses 40% of global memory production or 900,000 memory wafers (i.e. not yet turned into DDR5/DDR6 DIMMs) per month at price X in October 2025, leading to supply shortages and tripling of price, they have the option of later un-holding the warehoused memory wafers for a profit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46142100#46143535
Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain..
> As of late 2025, 900,000 finished 300 mm 3D NAND memory wafers (typical high-volume inventory for a major memory maker) are worth roughly $9 billion and occupy about 104–105 million cubic inches when properly warehoused in FOUPs. → Economic value ≈ $85–90 per warehoused cubic inch.
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#4532GB should be more than enough. You can go 16GB if you go native and throw some assembly in the mix. Use old school scripting languages. Debloat browsers. It has been long delayed.
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” - Bill Gates
there's no reliable evidence he ever uttered that phrase
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#46Think the article should also mention how OpenAI is likely responsible for it. Good article I found from another thread here yesterday: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#47> The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts. I have no clue if there's any price fixing going on like there was a few decades ago—that's something conspiracy theorists can debate—but the problem is there's only a few companies producing all the world's memory supplies.
So it's the Bitcoin craze all over again. Sigh. The bubble will eventually collapse, it has to - but the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent... or, to use a more appropriate comparison, have a working computer.
I for myself? I hope once this bubble collapses, we see actual punishments again. Too-large-to-fail companies broken up, people getting prosecuted for the wash trading masquerading itself as "legitimate investments" in the entire bubble (that more looks like the genetic family table of the infamously incestuous Habsburg family), greedy executives jailed or, at least where national security is impacted due to chip shortages, permanently gotten rid of. I'm sick and tired of large companies being able to just get away with gobbling up everything, killing off the economy at large, they are not just parasites - they are a cancer, killing its host society.
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#48Very happy to have bought a MBP M4 with 64 gb of Ram last year.
And sharing the RAM between your CPU/GPU/NPU instead of using separate memories.
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#49This is ultimately the first stage of human economic obsolescence and extinction. This https://cdna.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/2... will happen to every class of thing (once it hits energy, everything is downstream of energy).
Why should we believe in another apocalypse prediction?
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#50I know this is mostly paranoid thinking on my behalf, but it almost feels like this is a conscious effort to attempt to destroy "personal" computing. I've been a huge advocate for local, open, generative AI as the best resistance to massive take-over by large corporations controlling all of this content creation. But even as it is (or "was" I should say), running decent models at home is prohibitively expensive for m…
The first "proper" "modern" computer I had, initially came with 8 megabytes of RAM.
It's not a lot, but it's enough for a dumb terminal.